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How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life? With the loss of his son, the departure of his wife and the arrival of Muriel, a dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, Macon's attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone.

OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD

‘She’s changed my perception on life’ Anna Chancellor

‘One of my favourite authors ’ Liane Moriarty

‘She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan

‘Anne Tyler has no peer’ Anita Shreve

‘My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world’ Nick Hornby

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Review

"Anne Tyler gets better with every book, and this one is a triumph – funny, profound, sad and ultimately reassuring" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Warmly entertaining and sharply organised against cuteness or mush" (Guardian)

"The Accidental Tourist is one of Anne Tyler’s best books" (New York Times)

"A beautiful, incandescent, heartbreaking, exhilarating book… The Accidental Tourist cuts so close to the bone that it leaves one aching with pleasure and pain. Words fail me: one cannot reasonably expect fiction to be much better than this" (Washington Post)

"Everything this author writes is shot through with intelligent insight, humour and humanity" (Daily Mail)

Synopsis

How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life? With the loss of his son, the departure of his wife and the arrival of Muriel, a dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, Macon's attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone.

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'Anne Tyler is the person who first made me want to write: I picked up Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in a bookshop, started to read it there an then, bought it, took it home, finished it, and suddenly I had an ambition, for about the first time in my life.'

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree, p.187

I enjoy Nick Hornby's novels, and have found his various book lists a useful source of recommendations in the past. His praise for Tyler could hardly be higher: The Accidental Tourist appears on a list of his 'Top 5 Favourite Books' alongside Great Expectations. Although I was slightly sceptical that the novel could possibly live up to this introduction, I thought I would give it a go.

The central character is Macon Leary, the author of the Accidental Tourist guide book series for business travellers. The aim of this series is to provide information on where to find hotels and restaurants which are as close as possible to those that would be found at home in America. The French guide, for example, tells the reader where to find burger bars in Paris.

Macon is well-suited to the job of writing these books as he strongly dislikes the unfamiliar and unexpected. He is a man who prizes system, stability and domesticity. At one point he speculates as to whether hotel rooms could be supplied with small animals to make them more homely.

When the novel opens, his marriage to Sarah is breaking up. She finds him 'not a comfort'; his cautiousness bores her.

After they have separated, Macon notices that his Welsh corgi Edward is becoming increasingly troublesome. (Edward is a significant character in the book: he's brilliantly portrayed.) At length, Macon hires a dog-trainer to tackle the problem. Muriel, the trainer, is from a different social background to Macon: she's poorer, less educated, and perhaps an unlikely new partner.

At the heart of the story is the slowly shifting triangular relationship between Macon, Sarah and Muriel.

One of the most remarkable features of the book is Tyler's understanding of male psychology. The novels of Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Zoe Heller all contain convincing portraits of men, but neverthless the men in these books are, as it were, seen from outside: the stories are told from the female point of view. In the Accidental Tourist, Tyler succeeds in portraying a male character from the inside in a way which is quite uncanny.

The insight into the male psyche extends to her female characters: Sarah and Muriel often know what Macon is thinking almost before he has thought it himself.

By the end, I shared Nick Hornby's high estimation of the novel. The last chapter, in particular, is extra-ordinarily strange and moving.

I find the narrative to be dull, especially from the start then it got okay, but once I got halfway I was really bored and wasn't expecting much. It wasn't like 'haha' funny and some of the bits that were meant to be humourous didn't come across as so.The bits that would've been good - she glosses over. Oh, so Anne Tyler can go on about sitting next to a sweating man but won't write more about Macon's reaction to Julian's plan to propose? I felt like there was more story to be told on him and Rose and therefore things would've been much more interesting if Anne Tyler explored that option.There are many dwelling flashbacks which can be pointless at times and I think, 'is anything really happening?' It reminds me of 'Catcher in the Rye' because neither story goes anywhere and I felt like I'd wasted my time reading afterward.I do like, however, Muriel's training of Edward the dog - like Cesan Milan! Also, how she says those who don't like dogs don't get mushy with themk and so train them better. That worked out very well.There's a lot of emphasis on food in here too, which felt like more padding in the story.I hate Macon, he's dull and for someone who spends so much time thinking, and never 'chasing' women, he randomly suggests having sex with his wife on the sheets, and nearer the book's end, he says 'oh I consider it another year in our marriage' to make her feel better after him being with Muriel, but then SERIOUSLY randomly decides, since 'he's never made his own decisons things just come to him' that that is a great idea to run off with Muriel, since she was aggressive and stalked him to France. Yeah, everyone wants to date a stalker. So, that's what I mean by giving up at the end.On the plus, Tyler does explore hotels and makes random background characters vivid. I like that both Muriel and Sarah are imperfect women that aren't gorgeous and adored by all (though Sarah was as a teen).I'm not to keen on the fact that Sarah has to have not slept with any other man so she's keeping to lovely wife while Macon gets to live out sex-getter of the year. And how horrible is this? Macon thinks that people can be 'used up' that he 'used up' Muriel for sex. Just terrible.She does a good job of showing rather than telling which is good - you get a real view of who the characters are and you see how Muriel is quite loopy, like how she's asked a question and just rambles on about something else!

PLOT HOLEnot a big one, but within a few pages the character Muriel contradicts herself. She says that boys never proposed to her and at school they pretended they never dated her - but if that were true, then why at the start of a chapter had her previous husband insisted on getting married? And since he went to her school, there is yet another issue. She was married at 17 and he, 18, so there's no escaping it.

This is my first Anne Tyler read, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I loved this novel. The plot develops well, and the quality of the writing is excellent – and grammatical! The characters emerge by what they say and do, not by the writer’s description. As an English graduate, I empathise with Macon (how does one pronounce his name by the way – Mason? Makkon? Maykon?) when he feels compelled to correct poor English – although I would never have the courage to do it as he does – and I love Muriel – so feisty, so independent, so unglamorous, so ready to take on any job that’s going to earn a living,so determined to bring up her odd son as well as she can. She is totally unfazed by Macon’s more privileged upbringing and education, or by his correcting of her English. Like other reviewers, I came to care about all the characters – Jeremy, Rose, Sarah – even Macon’s brothers, who have a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aspect. .